I am honored to be invited to facilitate a workshop titled Teaching with technology: Basic tools and techniques, July 18-20, 2016. This is one of CLEAR‘s summer workshops, held at Michigan State University in East Lansing, MI.

In-class response systems

Description: Instructor creates multiple-choice, true-false, or short answer questions. Students respond using laptops or mobile devices. The instructor can display the results as they come in. You can let students respond anonymously or require students to enter their names. You can also use this system for in-class quizzes.

Platform: iPhone, iPad, or Android (only 1 needed per classroom). Website is useful for creating classes, questions, and quizzes, but a mobile device is needed to scan students’ responses.

Description: Students respond to multiple-choice and true-false questions using specially designed paper that they hold up. The teacher scans the room using a smart phone or tablet. The results can be instantly displayed.

Description: Upload video, then use YouTube’s editor to combine, split, and shorten clips and add a soundtrack, titles, and transitions.You need to be logged into your Google account to use this. The mobile app has more limited editing capabilities, but allows you to record video directly in the app.

Microsoft Office Mix – free plug-in for PowerPoint for creating narrated presentations that can be saved as videos. You can also include quiz questions. You need Office 2013 or later and Windows 7 or later to use this plug-in.

Description: Create a book using your own images and text, with a simple, user-friendly interface. You can publish a “proof copy” PDF for free, and you can upload your book to the Blurb website to get options to buy a printed copy or ebook. You retain copyright to your book.

Assessment of presentational/interpersonal speaking

Description: Embed these tools in your learning management system (e.g., Blackboard, Moodle), class blog, or web page. (Alternatively, you can use another tool called Mashups to easily create a web page – see below.) Use them to record audio and video in the browser.

Delivery of content

Mashups

Cost: Free

Platform: Web

Description: Another of the CLEAR Rich Internet Applications. Create a simple webpage in which you can embed any of the CLEAR RIAs above, plus text, images, audio, videos, and other elements. You can arrange the elements on the page with a simple drag-and-drop interface.

Description: Create a website and/or blog. Use various free themes to change the look of your site, and add in your own content with an editor that is similar to a word processor. No HTML or web programming skills needed. You can also add plug-ins that give you more functionality.

Description: Create a character and buy clothes with in-game currency. Answer questions and read your friends’ answers to the questions. Interact through photos of your characters and comments. Text-to-speech technology is used to read the text aloud.

Description: Create flashcards that include images and automatically generated audio. Play games and take tests with the words. With a paid account, teachers can also facilitate team games using the flashcard sets.

Platform: Web, with a browser plugin (mobile apps have a subscription fee)

Description: Save all of your usernames and passwords in one place. This app also generates secure passwords for you and saves you the trouble of remembering them. This helps keep your data secure by avoiding the reuse of passwords across websites.

Language exchange

Students or teachers can use the following free sites to set up individual or classroom exchanges. Keep in mind that this is an exchange, so they would need to speak English for half of the exchange time and the TL for the other half.

Description: Students can use this site to find a language exchange partner, or teachers can use the site to find a collaborating class. The Mixxer has tools for students to request confirmation to be sent to teachers to show that they participated in an exchange.

Teletandem Brasil – Set up language exchanges between your Portuguese class and Brazilian classes learning English

TalkAbroad – A paid service that includes tools for teachers to give instructions to conversations partners in advance. Students pay a fee per 30 minute conversation. Both teachers and students can access recordings of conversations. Available for Spanish, French, English, Mandarin, Arabic, German, Italian, and Portuguese.

Glossing

Rikaichan/Rikaikun – plugin for Firefox/Chrome browsers that produces a popup box showing the meaning & reading of Japanese words